Electronic musical instruments and more particularly music synthesizers today can generally produce only one particular note at a time and secondly they can produce only one particular tone quality at a time. Thus unlike a piano which can be played with up to ten notes simultaneously and run through an entire music composition without stopping, the synthetic electronic music devices or synthesizers today can generally play one finger music and whenever one wants to change the quality of the notes the performer must stop and reprogram the music. Generally this is done today by utilizing as part of the system a tape recorder. Thus a solo performer needs a tape recorder to produce musical sounds, and the only manner of producing a number of sounds, are with a number of performers all using synthesizers, much as would be created with a live group or band.
There have been suggestions in the prior art to use cathode ray tube devices with waveform readers as, for example, in Davis U.S. Pat. No. 2,601,265 and Bumstead U.S. Pat. No 2,241,027 where anodes take waveshape forms and in Rupert U.S. Pat. No. 3,484,530 where a waveform film is used on the face of a cathode ray tube. These devices have certain limitations and do not allow for timbre control and particularly control through the use of a second waveform device.